


Second Day of Christmas - God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen

by unjaundiced



Series: Holiday Headaches [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: 12 Days of Christmas, 12 Days of Fic, Baking, Gen, Humor, Improvisation, Ninjas Can't Do Anything Right, Pre-Slash, Trying too hard, bad friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-11 14:55:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5630590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unjaundiced/pseuds/unjaundiced
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kakashi ruins Iruka's day off by pestering him to help him make gingerbread using a recipe he got from a Snow Country child, which they learn the hard way is not ginger and bread mixed together. What's missing? Any kind of success.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Day of Christmas - God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen

 Iruka was sitting at his kotatsu staring moodily at the tree seated across the room in its delicately glazed Raku pot. Its sheer _presence_ was ruining his mood and his day off. The early morning sunlight slanted its yellowed beams in to cast a charming glow over the various miniature weaponry that decorated the kuromatsu. The snowy white caltrops made of bone caught the light and gave the tree a snow-dusted look. The dull edges of children's weaponry turned a soft gold and might have been utterly charming if Iruka wasn't just so _annoyed_ by the man who'd brought the poor innocent tree specimen in from the wet and abandoned it in his home.  
  
Shisha-kun shivered its needles as a faint breeze whispered in through a crack between the window and the sill. A moment later a knock sounded once before the window was swung wide open and a lanky shinobi hopped in, grey hair wildly tousled from the breeze that danced in around him, discarded boots clutched in one hand, soles respectfully covered with bags to preserve the floor. Ukki-san fit itself neatly in the neck of one of the boot tops and waggled its leaves in greeting. Iruka clutched his tea cup resolutely and refused to acknowledge his recent visitor. Instead he chose to speak to the tree.  
  
“I'd like to enjoy my one day off for the week. Can't you grant me just that one kindness? All I want to do is lie down and take a long nap,” he grumbled. Shisha-kun waggled its needles in sympathy.  
  
“Maa, Iruka-sensei. One might feel unwelcome if you talk like that,” the visitor whined as he carefully lay an oddly bulging cloth shopping bag on the kotatsu. Iruka refused to rise to the bait.  
  
“It's not that I mind, so much that it is that I've been _waiting_ for this day all week. It's just been that kind of a time,” he went on, ignoring the bag lying in front of him in a seductive and enticing manner. Iruka sipped at his tea as Shisha-kun's top branches waved sympathetically in a sudden gust that danced into the room.  
  
“If you don't want to help me then I guess I'll just have to find Naruto and let him know you want him to come over and help you keep busy,” the visitor hummed in an obnoxiously smug tone. Iruka muttered something indistinct under his breath and leveled a gimlet stare at the man.  
  
“What. Do. You. Want,” the chuunin grit out. “I can tell by the shopping bag that you are up to no good and intend to involve me.”  
  
Kakashi beamed back, practically aglow with an odd inner peace and sense of goodwill towards all mankind. It was probably one of his famed thousand jutsu and Iruka was not fooled. “It's for a good cause, Iruka-sensei. I thought we'd make Naruto some of those ginger bread things he likes so much.”  
  
“He's just pestering you about training again and you don't want to do it, right,” Iruka deadpanned. Kakashi's false aura of light and love dissipated immediately.  
  
“Too cruel. Iruka-sensei is too cruel,” the jounin muttered without heat. He scrubbed a little awkwardly at the back of his head. “But, you're right as always.”  
  
“At least you took off your shoes before entering this time,” Iruka conceded, choosing a rather tactful, he thought, change of subject. “The door is on the other side of the house though. Remember it.”  
  
Kakashi looked regretful in the most insincere manner a one-eyed man could. “Ah well, you know. Door. Window. All these square holes look the same when you're wandering the road of—“  
  
“Life. I know. I don't care about your overall roundness in the square hole that is the rest of the world. Remember where the door is and use it.” Iruka glared once more for good measure, downed the last bitter dregs of his tea and sighed. “So how do we make this ginger bread?”  
  
“Mix whatever is in the bag together,” Kakashi responded immediately. Iruka could have punched him for being so unhelpful.  
  
“Do you have a _recipe_? A video of someone making ginger bread? A step-by-step flip book? Stone tablets from an ancient monk? A child's handwritten instructions? Anything would be good right now.” Iruka was missing the soothing heat of his tea already.  
  
“Ah... yes. Yes! I have that,” Kakashi chirped happily, reaching into his weapons pouch and pulling out a rather worn copy of _Icha Icha Paradise_. Iruka eyed the book doubtfully.  
  
“I really hope you didn't get this ginger bread idea from _that_ ,” he muttered reproachfully. Kakashi immediately shook his head.  
  
“Not at all. The recipe is _in_ the book. More specifically....” Kakashi flipped the book open single-handedly and held it out so Iruka could see the bookmark he was using; a piece of paper with what appeared to be a childish scrawl of a list. He sighed. Of course he would.  
  
Iruka gingerly took the bookmark and put his best cryptology skills to work deciphering the mess as Kakashi took it upon himself to greet Shisha-kun and leave Ukki-san to greet its friend as he removed his boots to the genkan where they belonged. Iruka was busy congratulating himself on having figured out what the scribbles were supposed to have said by the time the jounin returned though he wasn't sure what 'molasses' was or if he'd guessed right.  
  
“Kakashi-sensei, is this recipe from a child,” he mumbled around the pencil top he'd tucked between his lips. Silence greeted him and he slid a suspicious glance toward his friend. A slightly confused look danced across Kakashi's face.  
  
“Did you even _read_ this? I'm assuming you couldn't. This,” Iruka poked at a particularly large scrawl on the paper, “says to add a 'large heap of love'. Unless that's code for a type of spice, I don't think that's possible.”  
  
“Maa, sensei. Between the two of us, I'm sure we could conjure up several large heaps of 'love',” Kakashi purred, equilibrium restored.  
  
“No. I don't think so.” Iruka's response was flat and immediate. “Especially not if it's for Naruto.”  
  
Kakashi didn't appear to be too broken up over the rejection as he began to inspect and remove articles from the shopping sack as if it had been Iruka, not he, that brought it over. Iruka rolled his eyes and inspected the various bottles and boxes now decorating his table: mochiko flour, a large ginger root, a bundle of rolled cinnamon sticks from the international market, a cone of salt, a dark yellow block of rich and very expensive, little available butter, a jar of strange brownish crystalline rocks, another jar, this filled with dark golden honey, a real rarity at this time of year and about as expensive as the butter, and a jar filled with what appeared to be water. Iruka frowned slightly, holding up the scrawled ginger bread recipe and darting looks between the collection of things on the tabletop and the paper. He raised a brow as Kakashi pulled the last item from the bag and put it on the table: a spool of sheeted steel rolled paper thin.  
  
“Kakashi-sensei, are you certain we can put mochiko flour in the oven? I don't understand. And why did you bring honey? ...and,” Iruka poked a finger at the glass jar that may or may not have contained water. “Water? And why did you bring rocks?”  
  
“So many questions, sensei. The recipe calls for flour and I don't know of any flour other than mochiko flour so I'm assuming that's what the kid meant. I've never made ginger bread before, but Naruto wouldn't shut up about in on the whole way back and I noticed Sasuke running off into the bushes fairly regularly and coming back smelling like ginger and cinnamon so I'm assuming they all like it.” Kakashi shrugged. Iruka nodded thoughtfully at that. He also knew of the Uchiha's semi-secret love of sweets.  
  
“As for the honey... someone told me that molasses was a kind of sweet syrup that comes from sugar, but we don't have that here so I assume honey is a good substitute. The 'rocks' are sugar crystals Gai,” Kakashi shuddered slightly. “Brought back as a souvenir from Thunder Country. They weren't that big before but it seems that he let them sit too long. Nobody knew what to do with them. Neat, huh? It's not very sweet so I can't imagine how molasses is sweet. Honey is obviously better.”  
  
Iruka nodded in agreement. He'd never liked syrup much anyhow, though Kotetsu was absolutely addicted to the stuff. He preferred the deep subtle sweet of honey. He shook the bottle of sugar rocks curiously and hmmed thoughtfully. “What about the water?”  
  
“Ah, it's from Jiraiya-sama. He brought some soda water from a spring he ran across while doing 'research'. It bubbles!” Kakashi jiggled the bottle lightly and tiny bubbles formed along the inside of the glass before detaching and floating lazily to the surface. “If you bake soda... That's baking soda, right?”  
  
Something about that argument was really off but Iruka couldn't find the point to argue so he let it slide. This ginger bread thing was sounding like more work than it was worth. He thought of Naruto's sunny face and sighed in defeat. How could he say no?  
  
“Naruto and Sasuke have some very expensive stomachs if they like this 'ginger bread'. I don't think we should make this for them after this,” he muttered. “Okay, let's do this if we're going to do this.”  
  
Kakashi beamed, swept the whole mess back into the shopping sack, caught hold of Iruka's arm and dragged him towards the kitchen, not even allowing him to get his feet under himself. Ukki-san and Shisha-kun sat in the living room in stunned silence; forgotten.  
  
The poor kitchen had never met such a violence as Kakashi and Iruka trying to discover the fine art of baking without so much as a crash course and only a child's scribbled instructions to go by, not to mention the rather creative ingredients changes induced by Kakashi.  
  
The mochiko flour was so fine it sent up a cloud that coated everything on and around Iruka when Kakashi dumped cups of it into a bowl. The jounin, of course, managed to dodge the clothes-seeking powder and remained the only spotless thing in the room. He was not, however, fast enough to avoid Iruka's retaliatory hands and still ended up covered in flour in the form of hand prints on his mask's cheeks and smeared across the front of his jumper.  
  
The cinnamon was also almost a disaster as the recipe had called for “ground cinnamon” and Kakashi had only bought a bundle of sticks, not thinking that Iruka might not have a spice grinder. The jounin had assured his friend that he would be able to grind it, even without a grinder, and had proceeded to hack wildly at it with a knife stolen from the drawer. The cinnamon had ended up... well, ground, Iruka supposed. There might have been bits of cutting board mixed in with it as well. Neither of them could tell and Kakashi had dumped the whole mess in with the flour before he could be stopped. The whole process was confusing to begin with and Iruka couldn't be bothered to mind much past a few weak protests.  
  
Iruka had been shaving a measure of salt off the cone with a paring knife when he realised Kakashi was about to use a stone pestle to smash butter into a cup to gain the proper measure. He immediately traded positions and declared firmly that there would be no smashing of anything near anything breakable of his, super elite jounin of a thousand jutsu or no. That being said, he'd been a little startled when, moments later, Kakashi started pounding wildly away at a measure of rock sugar in the mortar with the sugar jar and had been forced to do a bit of violent intervention that ended with Kakashi and himself squaring off on opposite ends of the kitchen threatening each other with spoons while the Sharingan spun with quiet menace as Kakashi tried to genjutsu him into thinking he was an orange.  
  
A few bruises and rather aggressive spoon-sparring bouts over whether or not there seemed to be too much spice—Iruka was almost certain that soup spoons were not the proper meaning of “teaspoon”, whatever that was—later and they finally managed to mix all the ingredients and hovered over the bowl frowning at the soupy unappetizing mess that nested therein. There seemed to be a pale and gritty stew in the bowl and Iruka felt vaguely ill just looking at it. Kakashi would have denied it until the very last page was torn viciously from his most precious edition of _Icha Icha Playdate_ but he also felt a little ill at the sight of the mixture.  
  
“Well, that would explain the cookie cutters,” he muttered under his breath as he tried to will back dry heaves.  
  
“What,” Iruka muttered dumbly, still entranced by the bowl that almost seemed to be _bubbling_ as random bursts of carbon dioxide pushed towards the surface.  
  
“Cookie cutters,” Kakashi muttered trying not to inhale too deeply, holding up the spool of steel sheet. “The kid said you're supposed to make shapes with them.”  
  
“Makes sense,” Iruka muttered back, also trying to breathe lightly just in case he _upset_ the possibly living thing in front of him. “It'll hold the goop in long enough to cook.”  
  
“Right,” Kakashi muttered again, backing slowly away from the bowl. “So let's just let it be for a little bit, ne?”  
  
“Of course. Leave it be. Sounds good.” Iruka slunk with him.  
  
They were much better with the steel; bending, cutting, and crimping like professionals. They got creative with the shapes: forming leaping ninjas, choko, shuriken and kunai, Konoha leaf shapes, Uzumaki swirls, dango, and even a few shogi tiles complete with kanjji insets to mark their positions. Kakashi also made a dolphin, just for kicks, and Iruka a scarecrow in retaliation. They hovered over their creations in the living room, showing them off to Shisha-kun and Ukki-san who almost seemed proud, neither wanting to admit his apprehension over returning to deal with the _thing_ currently living in the kitchen.  
  
When they finally ran out of things to mindlessly congratulate themselves about, they returned to the kitchen with all the enthusiasm of death-sentence victims. The mixture in the bowl had thickened some and seemed to have _grown_ a bit.  
  
“I think it's supposed to do that,” Kakashi murmured to himself, sounding far from certain. “The kid said it would rise.”  
  
“I think it's _breathing_ ,” Iruka grunted, daring to poke at a pillowy lump of soupy dough, jerking back as it deflated a little.  
  
“Then we should kill it now,” Kakashi responded, advancing with grim determination.  
  
It was a sticky struggle to pour the mixture into their “cookie cutter” moulds and another argument/spoon fight broke out over how high to fill them. They both ended up spattered with dough mixture after they'd disagreed about how to deal with possible sticking during cooking. Kakashi seemed to think mixing more butter with the dough soup would keep it from sticking to the flat metal sheet they'd found. Iruka was inclined to disagree and had expressed his disagreement by lobbing a gob of dough which started another small war.  
  
It wasn't until after they'd managed to get rid of all the dough that Kakashi noticed the large ginger root sitting curiously unmolested on the counter. A very bad feeling wriggled around in his stomach before working up to his brain to knock and deliver a message that he would soon be dead and better luck next life. The bad feeling became even more lively as Iruka's eyes locked on the suspiciously innocent looking root.  
  
“Kakashi-sensei,” Iruka growled, sounding impossibly frustrated.  
  
“Ah, Iruka-sensei...” Kakashi seemed unable to control his mouth. “It looks like I brought you a ninja ginger!”  
  
“Shut up and chop it up!” Iruka pointed imperiously at the unsuspecting root.  
  
“Yes, sensei,” Kakashi muttered glumly as he dispatched the poor thing with extreme prejudice.  
  
In the end they'd sort of swirled ginger bits in the the mixture as it lay in the moulds and hoped it was enough. Kakashi insisted that more ginger would be better considering that it was called “ _ginger_ bread”. All in all, the mixture was looking a bit dodgy anyhow and Iruka really didn't want to feed it to Naruto, not even considering the boy's cast iron stomach. He couldn't get over the feeling that they'd done something very wrong a _long_ way back.  
  
Fifteen minutes later and the two shinobi found themselves staring at ginger bread that had definitely less _risen_ and more _pflopped_. There was no other way to describe it. It looked a little like a squishy deflated balloon had descended upon the moulds on the sheet.  
  
“Back in the oven,” Kakashi announced. Iruka agreed. Kakashi slid the sheet back onto the oven rack and they hied themselves back to the living room for a continuation of their rousing game of Battleship Shogi. Iruka, impossibly and unforgivably, was winning.  
  
Another fifteen minutes, three breaks to check on the oven, and eight accusations of cheating by both parties and the sheet was out again. The ginger bread didn't look as pflopped as before, but it didn't look great either. It was powdery and flaky on the outside, slightly damp and chewy looking on the inside, and generally _hairy_ and _chunky_ from all the ginger bits. It smelled spicy from the ginger, rich from the cinnamon, and a thick kind of sweet from the honey which had separated and crystallized during the baking process and formed a candied caramel-like crust along the rims of the moulds.  
  
“Well, jounin first,” Iruka chirped, all fake smiles and devilish innocence.  
  
“You are too kind,” Kakashi muttered, gingerly breaking the leg off a rather puffy looking ninja bread man. “YOU FIRST,” he shouted suddenly, shoving the leg into Iruka's mouth as he sputtered and tried to escape.  
  
The ginger bread sort of dissolved into gritty particles as it met Iruka's tongue, the heat from the ginger bits spreading like bitter fire through his mouth. The burn of charred and overcooked sugars chased the heat, sharp hot spikes of cinnamon cresting the overall wave of oral torture. The center of the leg resisted the dissolution of the rest of its parts and stayed resolutely whole, a sticky disc of dense matter in his mouth. He spat it out without remorse.  
  
“We—“ He stuck his face under the tap and gulped water desperately before withdrawing for a breath, shaking his now wet head in denial. “We messed up somewhere. That's not food. That's _torture_!”  
  
Kakashi stared at him with a tense expression of vague horror, eye darting towards the faucet and back to Iruka who looked befuddled, then smug.  
  
“HAH! You tried it too, but you don't want to show your face, so you can't wash out your mouth!” Iruka crossed his arms and blocked the sink. “Serves you right!”  
  
Kakashi's eye narrowed briefly as he brought his hand up to the edge of his mask. Iruka's smug smile faltered and his breath hitched in surprise. Would he really? The next instant, he found himself several feet away and facing the wall, one of Kakashi's hands gently holding the nape of his neck as the jounin gulped water just as greedily as he had. He fought down a blush as Kakashi's fingers seemed to sear his skin.  
  
“I won't look,” he grumbled, batting at the hand.  
  
“Pah! That was unfortunate,” Kakashi spat from behind him, grip unrelenting. “We should give these to Ibiki.”  
  
“I think that's considered cruel and unusual punishment,” Iruka mourned. “Maybe we can just bury them in the Forest of Death under cover of night. No one would ever have to know.”  
  
A knock came at the door just then and Kakashi's hand was gone. Iruka spun and heard the door opening, Sakura's high-pitched voice calling out a greeting.  
  
“—enai-sensei gave me some gingerbread she got from an ambassador to Snow after an escort mission. I don't want Naruto to think I _like_ him or anything, but I know he _really_ likes this kind of thing. Just don't tell him it was from me! I don't want Sasuke-kun to get jealous!” The genin blushed and giggled to herself as Kakashi nodded in that vague I-don't-know-how-to-deal-with-children way of his.  
  
“Sakura-chan, welcome,” Iruka called out as he walked down the hallway. “I was wondering. What _is_ this 'gingerbread' thing anyhow?”  
  
“Oh, Iruka-sensei! Kakashi-sensei said you were busy grading papers. You are such a workaholic,” Sakura scolded.  
  
“Yes well, things seem to... pop up,” Iruka glanced meaningfully at Kakashi who put on his most innocent expression.  
  
“Gingerbread is a spice bread. It's only made with a little ginger, but you can't actually taste it. You can make cookies with it too, but I'm not really sure what those are. Bread is something they like to eat in Snow Country though. You should try it sometime! It's really good!” Sakura beamed.  
  
“I see. So it's 'gingerbread', not 'ginger and spiced bread'. That helps immensely.” He glared at Kakashi who suddenly looked as if he was going to start making excuses to get himself lost on the road of life.  
  
“Iruka-sensei?” The girl looked worried.  
  
“It's nothing! Go visit Sasuke-kun now. I'm sure he'll really appreciate the company,” Iruka smiled, shooing her off.  
  
“Eh... We can still use the cutters on _this_ gingerbread,” Kakashi ventured once the door closed.  
  
“Nothing will give me back my day off, Kakashi-sensei,” Iruka shouted, throwing one of their unfortunate ginger bread failures at the jounin's head. “How could you ask a five-year-old for cooking instructions in the first place!”  
  
“Hey,” Kakashi yelped as he dodged. “You didn't exactly stop me! You're an accomplice!”  
  
In the end, Kakashi and Iruka, both a lot worse for wear, leaned on each other and limped to Naruto's place with a package of gingerbread in the form of ninjas and Konoha leaves and Uzumaki swirls and other things. A less than savoury package of their failure was left on Ibiki's desk which thrilled him to no end when he came back from a late lunch and he immediately shared his newfound source of joy with some rather unfortunate interrogation trainees. He always enjoyed discovering new sources of torture.

**Author's Note:**

> These were originally written for the 12 Days of Christmas Challenge on Livejournal in 2010, starting with the first day of Christmas (December 25). It's basically all crack and I apologise for nothing.
> 
>  **NOTES**  
>  Real gingerbread ingredients >> flour, ginger, cinnamon, salt, shortening or butter, brown sugar, molasses, baking soda, warm water; love, not necessarily required and completely optional, though strongly suggested in many cases
> 
> Raku-yaki or Rakuware - is a type of Japanese pottery that is traditionally and primarily used in the Japanese tea ceremony in Japan, most often in the form of tea bowls. It is traditionally characterized by hand-molding of the clay as opposed to turning it on a potter's wheel, resulting in each piece being "one-of-a-kind"; low firing temperatures (resulting in a fairly porous body); lead glazes; and the removal of pieces from the kiln while still glowing hot. In the traditional Japanese firing process, the fired Raku piece is removed from the hot kiln and put directly into water or allowed to cool in the open air.
> 
> Caltrops – ninja tools strewn across the floor or other areas where one wants to hinder passage and may be made of glass, bone, ivory, metal, and less commonly, plastic and wood. [i.e. similar to jacks or tacks]
> 
> Mochiko (sweet rice flour) is made from sweet rice, also known as glutinous rice. It's powdery and can basically only be used to fry or be reconstituted with water to make mochi [basically chewy rice balls] and can't be baked without either turning powdery or densely chewy. There are pastries that can be made from it but they are usually thin and bean or cream filled.


End file.
